Layman's take on travel, technology & everything | Doesn't need to have a super brain, Just do your bit

Making an E-Library and Content Server with Calibre

“ I know the name Calibre is a complex-n-typical one and lengthy details about the product might bore you out before you even think about downloading and using it. But I bet, you are missing all the fun of E-Books word, if you are not using it. If you like read/ collect e-books over different interest to your hard drive or more better using Sony E-Book Reader, Amazon’s Kindley or Arnoid, then introduction with this simple yet amazing piece of software going to be a life turning experience for you.”

Many times you must have come across websites having lots of e-books and been impressed with the way, you could search and find e-books of your interests. By collecting from Campus LAN or over own searching efforts from Internet, we could soon obtain Gb of PDF, CHMs and other format e-books, but the part of managing this always growing collection has always been a tedious task (to me at least). Ever wondered, if you would be having such an E-Library of your own?

Here is an Open Source Solution for the same, a product named Calibre. The simplest use of the software is searching and adding or manually adding books to it and then obtaining a list to navigate and search through. In the process, it takes a folder and saves all the e-book files in it according to its own hierarchy of author name/ owner name etc. As output, it returns us a simple, yet sophisticated enough interface to deal with.

Calibre is primarily an open source e-book cataloging program, which is designed around the concept of logical book, where a single database entry may correspond to a variety of formats. It stores your book catalog as a database entry with easily editable metadata.

The exciting features of calibre could be categorized into six categories:

Library Management: It could sort your e-book collection by Title, Author, Date-Added, Date Published, Size, Rating, Series etc. In addition, it could work out extra searchable metadata like Tags and Comments. You can even export selected subsets of your collection to your hard disk or any external device in a fully customized folder structure.

E-Book Conversion: Calibre supports conversion of lots of E-Book formats to one- another and has supoprt to almost all known e-book formats, which makes it very special for collectors. The full list of supported formats could be found here. The conversion engine itself has many powerful features like generating table of contents, scaling fonts and creating book structures/ chapters etc.

E-book Reader Devices Support: Calibre has a modular device driver design that makes adding support for different e-reader devices easy. It has support for a large number of devices. It supports synching of metadata of the device with the metadata of library. While sending to device, calibre either automatically chooses the best format available or convert the e-book to a format suitable for the device.

Converting News and Blog Entries into E-Book Form: Calibre can automatically fetch news from websites or RSS feeds, format that into an e-book and upload to a connected device.

Comprehensive E-Book Viewer: Calibre has a built-in e-book viewer that can display all the major ebook formats. It has full support for Table of Contents, Bookmarks, CSS, a reference mode, printing, searching, copying etc.

and last but my favourite feature

Content Server for online access to your E-Library: Calibre has a built-in web server that enables others to access your e-book collection using a simple browser from any computer anywhere in the world. It can also email your books and download the news to you automatically. With support for mobile devices, you can always browse and download books from your smartphones and readers like Sony, Arnoid or Kindle etc.

Just think once, how exciting it would be sharing your all –ebook collection over the LAN and even over the internet (if you are making your PC a web server over internet).

So, what are you waiting for? Make a move to manage your digital habits effectively. Its sure going to be your one-stop solution for all your e-book management needs.

via Nitish Kumar's Blog:

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

Author: Nitish Kumar

I love to write and raising voice, sharing thought and heated debate is a kind of passion for me. Jobwise I am just another Computer professional handling Infra and designing solutions for a big Indian Media house but I love to write, sketch, photography and a lot more.
View all posts by Nitish Kumar